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CAPTCHA is short for “Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart”. The goal behind CAPTCHA is to prevent automated spamming.

No doubt you’ve been to web sites that make you decipher the warped letters in those little boxes before you can complete your request - that’s CAPTCHA!

Over the years, CAPTCHA has been improved upon and you may sometimes hear people refer to “reCAPTCHA” (which is the new and improved version). Unless you like to understand the technical stuff, there’s no need to worry about differences. Everybody is using the new and improved version (reCAPTCHA) today on their web sites.

CAPTCHA can be used to help …

• Prevent Comment Spam in Blogs
  Blogs using Black Hat tricks use automated computer programs to comment on other people’s blogs in order to get a link back to their site. CAPTCHA can help prevent this from happening by ensuring humans (not computers) are commenting on blogs.

• Prevent Fraudulent Email Registrations
  Another black hat trick is to sign up for a bunch of free email accounts with free services like Yahoo and MSN and then use those free accounts to spam people. CAPTCHA can help prevent this from happening by ensuring humans (not computers) are completing registration forms.

• Prevent Scraping of Email Addresses
  Ever wonder how spammers got hold your email address and started using it to send spam? Known as “spam harvesting”, spammer programs crawl the Web in search of email addresses posted in clear text. CAPTCHAs provide an effective mechanism to hide your email address from Web scrapers. The idea is to require users to solve a CAPTCHA before showing your email address. A free and secure implementation that uses CAPTCHAs to obfuscate an email address can be found at reCAPTCHA MailHide.

• Prevent Stuffing the Ballot for Online Polls
  Why place nice when you can cheat, is the model of many. And folks have found a way to “stuff the ballot box” (so to speak) for online polls. CAPTCHA can help prevent this by ensuring that only humans (not computers) are voting.

• Prevent Dictionary Attacks
  You’ve no doubt heard before that you’re not supposed to use words found in the dictionary in your passwords. That’s because aautomated password crackers check for words in the dictionary. Many computer systems will lock you out of your account after specified number of unsuccessful login attempts. We all make mistakes sometimes (for example not recognizing the caps-lock key is on) … and getting locked out our account is no fun. One way of working around this problem is to use CAPTCHA. The idea is simple. If you”re having trouble logging into your account, you’d be required to solve the CAPTCHA puzzle (rather than get locked out).

• Prevent Search Engine Bots from Reading Non-Indexed Web Pages
  It’s sometimes desirable to keep web pages from being indexed to prevent others from finding them easily. There is an HTML tag to prevent search engine bots from reading web pages - but it doesn’t guarantee that bots won’t read the page (it only serves to say “no bots, please”). The only way to guarantee that bots won’t enter a web site is to use CAPTCHA.

As you can see, there are lot of good reasons to use CAPTCHA on your web sites! And it’s easy to do.

To use CAPTCHA, you must first sign up for an account (it’s free). Next , you’ll want to get a reCAPTCHA API key (also free). You’ll need this key for CAPTCHA to work correctly. Be sure to save this key in file for future use.

By the way, if you use WordPress, you’ll also want to download the free CAPTCHA plugin and install it on your blog. After you upload and activate it, you’ll be asked for your reCAPTCHA API key.